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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28257552">this city's cold and empty</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lleavingwonderland/pseuds/Lleavingwonderland'>Lleavingwonderland</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Percy Jackson and the Olympians &amp; Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M, Post-The Last Olympian (Percy Jackson)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 19:47:44</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,231</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28257552</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lleavingwonderland/pseuds/Lleavingwonderland</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>""True, the last two weeks of the summer had been the best of his life. True, the euphoria of being alive and the high of being able to say ‘Annabeth is my girlfriend’ had been coursing through him like dopamine. <br/>But summer always comes to an end.""</p>
<p>or Percy is frustrated with mortal life after TLO and misses Annabeth</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Annabeth Chase/Percy Jackson</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>41</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>this city's cold and empty</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>here's a little ficlet i just found on my computer while i was procrastinating working on a real project enjoy it in all it's unedited glory</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>True, the last two weeks of the summer had been the best of his life. True, the euphoria of being alive and the high of being able to say ‘Annabeth is my girlfriend’ had been coursing through him like dopamine. But summer always comes to an end. <br/>Every summer the crashing stone cold reality of returning to school after months in myth and quests and life or death scenarios had been a terrible adjustment. School was always bad enough just because of Percy’s dismal academic record, dismal disciplinary record, not to mention his ADHD and dyslexia. Percy came home from the third day of sophomore year and threw his backpack across the empty apartment. It hit the wall with the weighty thud of several textbooks he would never open. <br/>Not even a month ago he had been a short subway ride away downtown fighting for his life, believing that he was under a prophetic death sentence. When the war ended it ended all at once—no more Kronos, no more prophecy, no more end of the world, no more Luke—leaving Percy to go back to high school, and continue life as normal. <br/>He felt like a sword being beaten into a plowshare. He still carried the Achilles curse, which after the war just meant that he wouldn’t cut himself shaving anymore. It was uncanny.<br/>Everything was different now. <br/>Even Rachel Elizabeth Dare who had previously been his connection to the mortal world was drawn into the immortal, and in the course of that change she had agreed to change schools to please her father, which meant that he was more alone than ever at Goode now. Percy didn’t have a good track record for making friends. Grover and Tyson who he had defended from bullies in middle school were now a general and lord of the wild, respectively. And Rachel was an oracle. <br/>His locker neighbor was probably an old god that would fight him in the hallway. Unfortunately the opposite was true—his locker neighbor was a completely ordinary sixteen year old who would ask something laughable like “Did you have a good summer?”. Chiron had once told him that demigods were more powerful because they walked in both worlds, inhabiting the mortal and the divine, but Percy didn’t feel like that. He felt like it was tearing him apart. He was a danger to his family. He could never have regular mortal friends without lying to them about most of his life. He got dragged away from the realest parts of him at the end of every summer. He felt like picking a fight. He was only 3 days into the school year. How was he going to survive the rest of high school?<br/>miss you, he texts Annabeth, lamely. <br/>It feels like something that doesn’t need to even be said: you are not here right next to me and therefore I am missing you. He says it anyway though, because it’s all he has. He’s not a wordsmith.<br/>Truth be told he’s weird about texting and forgets he has a phone half the time, meaning its constantly getting left and lost. He’s only had one for a grand total of two weeks—his mom had given it to him as a sixteenth birthday present, figuring it couldn’t possibly make things more dangerous than they already were, and she really needed him to stay in touch. And it helped to be able to communicate with Annabeth now that they were dating without trying to make a rainbow in the bathroom sink on a nightly basis. He had experience trying and failing at that.<br/>Sometimes Annabeth took a while to respond; she turned her phone off if she was in class or working on something important, and she had been known to read messages and just forget to respond to them for hours.<br/>It was the middle of the night. He was laying in his room with the light off, not sleeping. He just kept thinking about sitting on the beach with Annabeth. The oppressive heat of a stuffy un-air-conditioned apartment and scratchy sheets kept sleep just out of reach, so his mind wandered to greener pastures, catalogued moments of impossibility—and the relief of being able to just stare and stare at Annabeth without her glaring daggers at him, the ability to lean over and kiss her and feel her smile against his lips, feel her calloused fingertips hold his hand with all of the intensity but none of the fierceness that they gripped her dagger on a quest. Just hours of the two of them, toes in the sand, remaking the world. <br/>Annabeth was an hour away, at a boarding school outside of Brooklyn off the 495. He could take Paul’s Prius and just go. Screw that it was already past midnight and there was nothing to do in the suburbs, things were just easier when he was with her. Things just made sense—the screaming fight or flight, the racing of his mind, the stress of the future all went quiet, all faded to background noise. <br/>The sad truth was he couldn’t drive to see her, however much he wanted to, at least not legally—he didn’t even have his learners permit yet. Most kids he knew signed up to get the thing on their birthday and studied for weeks leading up to it—he had been a little busy trying not to die. There was no sense studying for a stupid written driving exam between guerrilla missions against the titan king. And now it’s just another thing he has to try to care about.<br/>It’s 12:15 when his phone lights up with Annabeth’s response:<br/>you too. <br/>Two words that somehow take a knot out of his stomach and tension out of his shoulders. Every second he hadn’t heard from her was a second she could be in danger, a a second of uncertainty. All of that evaporated in a bubble of pixels on his phone screen. And a second later: can you talk<br/>He calls her, sitting on the floor to reach the charger, whispering so he doesn’t wake his parents.<br/>He asks about her day, drowns in the rhythms of her voice, tries to remember every quirk of her smile and the glitter in her eyes while they commiserate about homework. <br/>“It’s late,” she says, finally, “I should probably finish my precalc.”<br/>“Wait, do you want to go out? With me. Do you want to go out with me?”<br/>“Percy we’re already dating.”<br/>“No I mean on an actual date. This weekend. If you’re not busy.”<br/>He hopes the silence on the other end of the line is filled with the smile that shines out her eyes when she covers her mouth with her hand, and not the pursed lips and furrowed eyebrow concentration.<br/>“Where are we going?” <br/>He can hear the smile on her voice. It makes everything worth it.<br/>“I haven’t actually gotten that far yet,” he admits. “I just want to see you.”<br/>“I’ll look forward to the surprise then.” It’s not true. She hates surprises, always has. But he can hear the conspiratorial smile in her voice. <br/>“Goodnight,” he whispers.<br/>“Goodnight,” she says back. He stays on the line, silently, until she ends the call, the phone pressed against his chest like he’s holding his heart outside his body. </p>
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